The CATabolism of a CATastrophe called CAT

The scene is a long room. With a long table. And 20 odd gentlemen sitting with a long face. Yes, after being flooded with complains of the CAT paper being too biased in its nature, with the quantitative section favouring engineers and the English section being a cakewalk for arts students, the paper setting committee has decided to change the pattern such that they can comprehensively club the quantitative and the analytical reasoning section, so as to ensure that students have to be good at more than just number crunching to be able to crack this section from now on. Hence, now the Common Admission Test (CAT) will become the Revised Admission Test (RAT) and here is a preview of the RAT paper (the correct answers being the ones in bold):

Q 1] Sameer has to make a telephone call to his friend Harish. Unfortunately he does not remember the 7 – digit phone number. But he remembers that the first 3 digits are 635 or 674, the number is odd and there is exactly one 9 in the number. The minimum number of trials that Sameer has to make to be successful is:
(a) 10,000
(b) 3402
(c) 3200
(d) However many he does make it’ll still be much cheaper to just go over to Harish’s house and talk.

Q 2 ] Shyama and Vyom walk up an escalator (moving stairway). The escalator moves at a constant speed. Shyama takes three steps for every two of Vyom’s steps. Shyama gets to the top of the escalator after having taken 25 steps, while Vyom (because of his slower pace lets the escalator do a little more of the work) takes only 20 steps to reach the top. If the escalator is turned off, how many steps of the escalator would they have to take to walk up?
(a) 40
(b)50
(c)60
(d) All of the steps on the escalator

Q 3] A rich merchant had collected many gold coins. He did not want anybody to know about them. One day his wife asked “how many gold coins do we have?” After pausing a moment, he replied, “Well! If I divide the coins into two numbers equals the difference between the squares of the two numbers.” The wife looked puzzled. Can you help the merchant’s wife by finding out how many gold coins the merchant has?
(a)32
(b)24
(c)30
(d) No

Q 4] A pipe can pump out water at the rate of 6 litres per minute and another waste pipe can empty a vessel in three minutes. A farmer opens the inlet pipe and leaves and then comes back when the tank should have just been full but then realizes that the waste pipe has been accidentally left open. He shuts that pipe and now the tank fills in 2 minutes. How much time does the waste pipe take to drain the entire tank alone?
(a) 7 minutes
(b) 10 minutes
(c) 12 minutes
(d) Being a staunch environmentalist and pro water conservation, I refuse to answer such questions about wasteful farmers


Q 5] Harry Potter goes to a shop where he buys 2 pencils, 3 erasers and one sharpener for Rs. 30. If he purchases 4 pencils, 5 erasers and 2 sharpeners it costs him Rs. 50. How much will it cost him to buy 5 pencils, 2 erasers and 3 pencils?
(a)60
(b)70
(c)55
(d) He is Harry Potter for Gods sake, he can just say Creatus thingus and can get as many pencils, erasers and sharpeners as he likes for free.

Q 6 A man walks up to another man and pointing at a lady tells him “That woman is my aunt’s cousins nieces daughter-in-law’s sisters mothers daughters maternal grandmother” How is the man related to the woman?
(a)Sons’ nephews’ brother
(b)Uncle’s son-in-law
(c) Father’s sisters second cousin
(d) A more pressing matter at this point is not to bother about how he is related to the woman but instead to correct his manners, what with him pointing at ladies like that, and also to treat his verbose Tourette syndrome, thus making identifying his relations a much lesser need of the hour.


Q 7] In how many ways can 3 boys and 2 girls be seated for a photograph such that no two girls are sitting together?
(a)72
(b)64
(c)36
(d) I refuse to answer this question as it is too sexist.

Q 8] Chip and Dale stole some nuts from Donald Duck’s garden. When Donald catches them, chip says “seven times the number of nuts that I have stolen + four times the number of nuts that dale has stolen will give the sum as 46” Donald wants to punish them according to how many nuts they have stolen. How many different solutions can Donald come up with?
(a)12
(b)10
(c)8
(d) Donald Duck contacts his exceedingly rich relative Uncle Scrooge who sends a mathematician to solve the riddle or better still a hypnotist to get the truth out of Chip and Dale.

Q 9] A father and his son are waiting at a bus stop in the evening. The father notices that there is a lamp post behind them. The lamp post, the father and his son stand on the same straight line. The father observes that the shadows of his head and his son’s head coincide at the same point on the ground. If the heights of the lamp post, the father and his son are 6 metres, 1.8 metres and 0.9 metres respectively, and the father is standing 2.1 metres away from the post, then how far (in metres) is the son standing from his father?
(a)0.9m
(b)0.75m
(c)0.6m
(d) Far enough to not be embarrassed by his ridiculously over observant and idle-minded father.

Hence, moving on from the good old times when cracking the CAT would CATapult you to fame and CATalyse your career, making you a good CATch, RATher now you’ll just have to RATtle your brains to RATify your place in the RAT race. So good luck with that because after all, the times are-ugh-changing.

P.S. - What did Shabana Azmi tell Farhan Akhtar when he refused to pray? "Oye, it's Friday !"